Museum of Contemporary Art looks back at the '80s

April 25, 2012|By Lori Waxman

A group of young people clustered around a video monitor at the entrance to the Museum of Contemporary Art's survey of the art of the 1980s. Playing was "Wild Style," the rawest, coolest movie ever made about rap and graffiti. Charlie Ahearn shot it in 1982, when the people watching at the MCA had not yet been born.

Is "This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s" an exhibition for people who were not alive when Reaganomics heralded a new era of luxury and disparity? When the cultural revolutions of the '60s ended their marches and started to find multiracial and female representatives finally sitting at the table? When AIDS became the most urgent rallying cry, as the radical act of same-sex love found itself ending in death and, possibly worse, indifference?

Viewers of any age must check all the usual expectations for a retrospective exhibition at the door. "This Will Have Been" makes no claims to being chronological or inclusive, nor to fitting '80s art into any of its familiar categories. There's not a painting byJean-Michel Basquiatin sight, nor wall text trumpeting "Appropriation Art" here or "Neo-Expressionist Painting" there. This is exciting. Would that the results were consistently so.

The exhibition, organized by Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, begins promisingly. Or rather, it begins with an installation of works that speak forcefully about broken promises. Front and center stands Krzystof Wodiczko's "Homeless Vehicle," a shopping-cart-cum-missile designed in collaboration with its intended users, meant to provide storage space for redeemable bottles and cans, a sleeping chamber, a wash basin and a conspicuous message about the utter unacceptability of human beings living on the street. Nearby, Adrian Piper's "Calling Cards" rages politely at racist and sexist remarks, handouts given by the artist — a light-skinned black woman — to offending commentators. Everywhere scurry the life-size rats Christy Rupp once printed up as posters, and wheat-pasted in long lines across lower Manhattan. It isn't a pretty picture now, and it wasn't then.

Next comes a suite of rooms that bear witness to endings — the death of painting, the scourge of AIDS. "The End Is Near" trumpets a wall text. The art world did not go quietly in either case. Painters like Gerhard Richter, Mary Heilman and Peter Halley fought the good fight, armed not just with brushes and acrylic but irony, punk edge and social consciousness. The audacity of hanging this work within spitting distance of General Idea's "AIDS Wallpaper" pays off, animating the tensions of a decade that swung precipitously between radical and conservative, freewheeling and critical.

Another cluster, under the heading "Desire & Longing," induces shivers by placing Jeff Koons' shiny stainless steel "Rabbit," sign and symptom of a lust for fancy consumer goods, in front of some of the most aching, honest art by men about their attraction to other men's bodies. David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Mapplethorpe, who made those haunting works, all died of AIDS. Koons made a fortune from sales, and contributed to the wealth of countless collectors and dealers. And this all happened in downtown Manhattan, at more or less the same time.

Potent moments like these, planted like ticking time bombs throughout the museum, would have added up to an explosive exhibition. Instead, the second half of "This Will Have Been" disappoints, despite terrific work by familiar names like Rosemarie Trockel, Haim Steinbach, Robert Gober, Jimmie Durham and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as the less familiar Deborah Bright, Lorraine O'Grady and Jac Leirner. The curatorial moxie disappears. Themes of "Democracy" and "Gender Trouble" read like so much text on a wall. Art works that ought to have gained something through proximity lose something instead.

Displays of powerful, witty activist campaigns by the Guerilla Girls, Gran Fury and Group Material — fighting sexism in the art world, racism and homophobia in the general populace and AIDS biases in the White House — look lost and flimsy, stuck near an emergency exit or over a doorway. In real life these posters shouted proud from the sides of city buses. Jenny Holzer's "10 Inflammatory Essays," unsigned excerpts from incendiary political and aesthetic manifestoes, simply photocopied on colored paper, usually plasters an entire wall. Here it barely registers on the narrow side of a partition.